Liberals are sort of, fundamentally incapable of understanding that the republican voter is more than just like, some stereotypical idiot white southerner, or self-interested multi-millionaire, I think. They're incapable of understanding that republican voters can often be some of the more marginalized in society. The disabled, and migrants, as we've seen. Dumb people, even, right, people with less education. Explicitly, explicitly this is the case, they bring it up all the time! As though that lack of education is some sort of moral failing, or thing to poke fun at. They don't understand that conservatives will rightly point out that sort of mockery and call them cruel elitists. It takes this cruel and apathetic stance towards those groups, this unempathetic stance that has no interest in understanding how we got there, this incurious stance. It's so overly moralized, to the point of incoherence. Well, that disabled person or migrant voted for trump, so, FAFO, they deserve to die, I guess. What am I to do? Well, looks like the palestinian voter in michigan decided not to vote, so, FAFO, guess their family is reserved to being buried under beachfront property. What am I to do?
It's callous, it's a self-callousing kind of reaction. It makes you number, and it makes you dumber. It's cope, basically, I guess is what I'm saying. It's a way to contend with a cruel reality by becoming crueler yourself.
It also has some intersection with two things. This assumption of free will, and thus a kind of innate moral character and disposition, a constant internal moral agency for all your actions, and so there's obviously something it inherently shares there with liberalism philosophically, right.
It also, in the positive rhetoric, has an intersection with this sort of, political armchair jockeying, where everyone theorizes that rhetorical moves are being made by politicians for some theoretical person out there that isn't them, but the fundamental character of the party is still agreeable, and okay. You can't question the party's positioning on Gaza. Even if you can cede that it's immoral, explicitly, then it has to be done because it's electorally advantageous. I don't understand how they can't see how this alienates a ton of people right off the bat, because it shows that you're willing to do things which are actively morally detestable and still not win. It's never the case for policy which itself is a positive end, like healthcare, that they are willing to violate legal and political norms in order to take action on that. Or even, say, violating political norms in order to stop a genocide. It's only that they're willing to keep up a genocide in order to win electorally, and then whatever follows is sort of what you're just supposed to get as a reward for sitting through 200,000+ people dying.
So I dunno, that all just pisses me off. I wish people could argue about actual tangible policy, and then pursue that unabashed as an unqualified good, rather than being tricked into believing that their own sense of good, their own goals, are naive, and they need to settle for more exploitation as the cost of doing business. It's both a cope that makes you callous and it's a nihilism that grinds you down. An apathy, in the face of politics.
I also don't understand why in the political realm we have all been so reduced to viewing things purely in terms of like, whatever is within our black and white moral compass. So team-based. No attempt at nuance, understanding, or empathy. It's insane, I think social media has truly kind of rotted people's brains, in that respect, by shaping the contexts in which these kinds of interactions happen, reducing the means of people's expression into pre-approved categories, into little sequestered realities. We're maybe cooked cause of that, I don't know.
Social media really accelerated that particular kind of violent, hedonistic stupidity, I think. Explicitly monetized it, explicitly selects for it, even on platforms which would otherwise appear to be algorithmically agnostic in their format. I'm not sure how to solve that, or if it's even solvable, in the current system in which the internet exists. I think I still need to watch that one zizek video where he talks about how the function of ideology is to kill hope, and I maybe kind of agree with that statement at face value even if he's probably going to end up saying something much more complicated and nuanced in the actual video.
You don't have to read all this if you don't want to, but it feels as though many things which are otherwise politically agnostic, ideologically agnostic, are kind of, thrust into the political realm with great violence, mostly as a kind of hedonistic rhetorical game rather than through a legitimate desire to improve things. In order to score political points. Things like public transportation, something which is otherwise politically neutral, actually not that related, fundamentally, to any ideology inherently, get politicized, and then they're guaranteed to die in that throes of that. The rights of transgender people is maybe another such example. These are things which, regardless of your ideological or political predisposition, are totally fine to have, right. Public transportation, or, maybe put more literally, regardless of public-private structure, trains, buses, trams, subways, even bikes and pedestrian-friendly development, is just explicitly more efficient than the car centric, overly privatized shit we currently have. That's true in both a privatized context and in a public context, and you could have an orientation towards either method of development regardless of your politics. The elites, presumably, want a better standard of living, not even just long term, but on the scale of, say, the next five or ten years, right, and mass transit projects can achieve that goal, even for them, by virtue of letting them save on the costs spent on their peasantry, their underclass, and increases the level by which private roadways, a private transportation, can be used easily by them. Transgender rights are the same way, decreasing trans healthcare provides a maybe minor, yet still existent, cost, it imposes a cost on society. You hear this explicitly called out whenever some chud talks about the suicide rate. Ideally, you would want to avoid suicide! You would want that healthcare, you should want to prevent that, in an ideologically neutral context, because it's strictly inefficient!
I think, then, maybe the great achievement of the social media superweapon in a post-nuclear, cold war context, is to manipulate these aesthetic ideological dispositions, disconnected from reality, to recreate the appearance of politics without any of the content. I think maybe cynically that it's just a grand kind of illusion used by three letter security agencies and private capital interests to explicitly manipulate the population, not into necessarily being concerned with actual material reality, but into being lost in this kind of hedonistic game world. I dunno. I think even beyond that we're kind of, as we're seeing now, we're now all explicitly lost in that illusion, the illusion that was created by the internet, or, maybe, the illusion that created the internet. Even at the highest levels of government, this is the case. There's no concern with any basis in reality, anymore. So under the guise of that, right, I think maybe we're cooked, is I guess what I mean. Nobody's steering the ship, anymore, even.